


Childhood (If It Could Ever Be Called That)

by NevillesGran



Series: The Storm Queen [1]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Tarvek (and Anevka referenced) Mondarev, Violetta Sturmvoraus, Zeetha "Holzfäller" Wulfenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7144775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Violetta and Tarvek, and Gil and Zeetha, switched places? I present: an AU.</p><p>(This is only nominally narrative, sorry. Real fic happens in the rest of the stories, but I thought some background belonged here as well as on tumblr.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

What if there had been a different Princess of Sturmhalten? One who only had one child, a daughter, and that only many years after her sister had produced a strong male candidate for the throne. And then she died, just a few months later in the early days of the Other War. Torn apart by revenants before people learned how unsafe it was to travel without an army as back-up. These things happened, in those dark days. (These things particularly happened if, a few years previously, one had told Lucrezia Heterodyne née Mongfish to get the hell out of one’s castle, and suggested that if she was so determined to cuckold her dashing new husband, she should go visit Klaus Wulfenbach in whatever hell she’d sent him to. The Princess didn’t  _know_ , but she knew Lucrezia Mongfish, and the implication was clear that she would be willing to pay for the trip.) 

No bombs fell on Sturmhalten, but nobody questioned that they hadn’t suffered losses. The Prince, it was said, never quite recovered from the death of his wife, retreating instead into his work. His daughter knew him better as “the Prince”, referred and deferred to by nursemaids, than she did as “Father.”

Princess Violetta Sturmvoraus of Sturmhalten and Balan's Gap (full title) had one friend, or as close as it got: her cousin Tarvek spent most of his time at Sturmhalten when he wasn’t away in Smoke Knight training. He was, after all,  _her_  Smoke Knight, as his older sister was Martellus’s. (He should arguably have been with Xerxsephnia, but Violetta and Seffie were about equal in terms of royal female uselessness, according to the family’s metrics, so Tarvek and Anevka’s mother had gotten a rare choice of what to do with her son, and marked him down for service to her own mistress’s daughter.) (She had died with the former Princess, failing to defend her from the revenants.) So far as Violetta was concerned, Tarvek was annoyingly good at getting her to stop throwing tantrums - which were  _fun -_  but he read books well, with voices, and made great block towers for her to knock down, so overall he was her favorite.

Then the Prince decided to show he had nothing to hide by sending her, his only daughter and heir, as hostage to Baron Wulfenbach. Away from home, barely more than a toddler, clutching her favorite stuffed mimmoth and shrinking away from the airship windows for fear she might fall out.

But Castle Wulfenbach was  _wonderful_. The nanny in charge was more terrifying than any Violetta had encountered before, but she was fair and she actually seemed to  _care_ , even as she snarled so furiously that Violetta - and many of the other children; she wasn’t in bad company - burst into tears. And there were so  _many_  other kids, all to play with. Violetta knew (even at age four, maybe five) that they mostly liked her because she was royalty and the daughter of a strong spark, because that was how it worked, but she could forget about it because at least they were  _there_ , and friendly, and Castle Wulfenbach was warm and cramped and new, elegant in a completely different way from Sturmhalten’s old stone. There were still rules, of course, there were always rules: play with your own kind, pick on those beneath you, don’t leave the school…they were almost as strict as at home.

But Violetta had never been one for following rules if she could get away with it. So one day when she saw Zeetha Holzfäller sneaking away to cry instead of eat lunch, Violetta picked up an extra bowl of stew and followed.

 


	2. Chapter 2

It took about half an afternoon for Zeetha to become Violetta’s new favorite person. She didn’t have a real ranking system; that would be stupid and boring (and more organized than her just-barely-five self was inclined to be) - but if she had, Zeetha would have brought an end to its recent turmoil by seizing first place and pulling it meters ahead of everyone else. Tarvek had been replaced nearly as soon as Violetta arrived at the Wulfenbach school and found people who would play with her who weren’t  _assigned_  to it, even if that meant they sometimes stopped when she didn’t want them to. But Zeetha was so friendless that she almost never declined a chance to play, and didn’t even mind that Violetta was three whole years younger. And where Tarvek was like half a nursemaid himself, always stopping Violetta from doing really fun stuff like climbing and jumping off things, the first secret thing Zeetha showed her was a way of sneaking from the school to the kitchen by leaping across crossbeams in a series of unfinished rooms. Violetta had to get running head starts to make some of the jumps, and even with her beginner’s Smoke balancing lessons, she nearly fell twice. 

It was the  _funnest thing ever_. 

They went exploring almost every day after that - or night, when they were supposed to be asleep. They got yelled at more when they got caught at night, and Madame Von Pinn was  _scary -_ but they didn’t get caught very much. Zeetha was slight and nimble and Violetta was small even for a five-year-old, and they both already knew the trick of holding still in the shadows so that people’s eyes would pass over them. Violetta was pretty impressed that Zeetha had figured it out by herself, instead of being taught, but then, Zeetha spent a  _lot_  of time sneaking around. When even Violetta got too tired for it. She would make an  _amazing_  Smoke Knight.

Violetta didn’t tell her that, of course. She was little and counted out for not being a boy, but she knew how to keep a stupid family secret. 

Except then one night they broke into the Baron’s Top Secret Records Vault, and it turned out that Zeetha didn’t. Know how to keep a secret. Violetta’s secrets, at least, like the map she was making of the Castle that she kept hidden under a loose floor tile beneath her bed, or that her letters home took so long to write not because she was only just learning but because they were partly in code. (Violetta had learned substitution ciphers at the same time she learned to read proper Romanian, nearly a year before coming to Castle Wulfenbach. It wasn’t like it was hard.)

So back to home. Back to cold stone, snow and ghosts - white women with spiders and wasps and the weight of history bearing down, stern portraits lining hallways built too grand and tall to hold anything but shadows. You had to be wary of the shadows, because you never knew who might be waiting in them, and what poisons they might be holding. Back to home, where the servants flinched and the nursemaids scolded but not like they cared if she did something wrong - like they were terrified of what would happen to _them_ if she stepped out of line. Back to home, where everyone who wasn’t scolding her was sneering or being disappointed or simply ignoring her - or, often, all at once.

Maybe Zeetha just hadn’t  _cared_  to keep Violetta’s secrets. Why should Violetta have expected any different?

Back to home where she still had lessons, but they were with tutors now, not in fully, busy classrooms. All on her own, chastised for not working harder when she didn’t even care about arithmetic or the history of Paris or whatever. Science was the worst, because it was the only thing her-Father-the-Prince asked her about and she just couldn’t bring herself to be interested. It was confusing and boring and she tried, a little bit, because he kept asking her questions if she could give the right answers, but she just didn’t  _care_ about the stuff. 

Except enough chemistry to identify poisons, of course. Violetta wasn’t stupid. She knew how to survive.

Sometimes she visited and had lessons with her cousins: Seffie, the only one her age, who was sometimes alright, had good taste in dolls at least, but always insisted on being in charge of the game even though Violetta was actually higher-born. Martellus, Seffie’s excuse for being bossy all the time, who was  _completely_  overbearing because they all knew he was going to be Storm King one day. Martellus was just barely made tolerable because his voice started cracking in the middle of a singing lesson one day and Tarvek snickered and called him “Tweedle”, and it stuck. Anevka, who was quiet when she wasn’t making cutting remarks and always smiled like she knew something Violetta didn’t. Which was probably true because she was older and nearly full-trained Smoke Knight, but she didn’t have to practically shout it. 

And Tarvek, who wasn’t even Violetta’s Smoke Knight anymore, and didn’t always have class with them because he was off studying storming  _science_. He’d had his Breakthrough when she was away on the Castle, and she’d taken little note of the news at the time because she and Zeetha had been plotting a prank on Zulenna that involved sneaking into one of the in-use labs and finding something to turn her hair green. But sparks couldn’t be Smoke Knights, they were more use at other tasks. 

Back to home, where worse than silence and emptiness was when Order members came over to meet with her-Father-the-Prince and their Smoke Knights wouldn’t even let her spy on the meetings, because she was young and a girl, just  _rubbing in_  that she was useless and unwanted. 

But even those weren’t as bad as the times other girls came to visit, not as young as Violetta - though they got closer as she grew - and sparky, which she was decidedly not. Those times, Violetta put on a fancy dress and a happy smile and played hostess, because she was the only Princess in Sturmhalten and that was her duty. She loved the dresses, but she started to hate them because the smile hurt so much, and she only got to take it off when her-Father-the-Prince decided he’d learned enough over veriferic wine.

Sometimes he insisted Violetta stay for the rest of the procedure as well, and share in his excitement that maybe  _this_  would be the time it worked. When it inevitably didn’t, he hid his disappointment behind a lecture on the importance of failure in experimentation. 'Only from failure could they  _truly_   _learn_.' When Violetta nodded obediently, not looking at the girl slumped over in the Lady’s throne, her-Father-the-Prince patted her on the shoulder and assured her that the day  _would_  come when she understood -  _he_  was, after all, a  _magnificent_  spark, and her mother had been from a  _very_  promising bloodline. It was just a matter of  _time_  before Violetta broke through and joined her cousins in the advanced science lessons.

Yes, that home.


End file.
